Former student Warner Johnston validates that Bellairs "took the GIS very seriously,” remembering Bellairs’ role in a protest march with other faculty members and students to the President's residence. “Bellairs was one of the four pall-bearers, along with me, who carried a full sized coffin that contained the Spirit of Shimer,” Johnston recalls of the event, also described by Bellairs in a February 22, 1967 letter to friend John Drew. Drew notes that the letter just goes to show how radical everyone was in the 1960s: "what a contrast with today. John certainly seems to have stepped out of one of his own books here - a militant protest in burnished armor. But, under the fancy dress, he shows there was a serious concern about educational principals.”

There was one bit of hope, an independent report to the Board that Dowty remembers took the side of the dissidents, describing them as the 'heart and soul' of Shimer. If the Board had acted quickly on the recommendations in the report, Dowty feels the campus might have been saved, and perhaps John, as well as many others, would have had long and happy careers in Mount Carroll.

Mullin’s control over the levers of power proved to be overwhelming in the short run, with many people being driven away by the way Mullin reacted to the criticism: “such as publicly blaming the affair on drugs and permissiveness, which was absolute nonsense,” Dowty says. Former students Johnston and Tanty agree that when Mullin blamed the school’s problems on drugs, it showed how sheltered and out of touch with reality he was and that he did not want to acknowledge the real problems. Mullin also made public statements Dowty remembers, that denigrated the faculty, reputedly belittling the faculty to the Board of Trustees, bragging that he had more publications than the entire Shimer faculty put together.

This was the 1960's and in terms of student life, Dowty notes that Shimer was not immune to what was happening everywhere. As to be expected, the students reacted to the problems on campus by taking an active interest in the daily discord but they were never initiators in the struggle, Dowty explains, though they did get pulled into the turmoil: “most of the students sided with the dissidents because they knew who the good teachers were and also what Mullin was like. Mullin used excuses like drugs and sex and the general counterculture movement as a cover to hide the deeper conflict that was actually going on. He was a puritan at heart who, when I was a student, routinely expelled any student caught drinking or with alcohol, a policy backed up by surprise inspections of students' rooms while they were at the weekly required assembly. He had not been able, however, to stem the tide of the 1960s, so that by the time I returned as a teacher, things had loosened up considerably. But it was still not a den of iniquity. Pot was widespread on the student side; I was somewhat taken aback, about a month or two after arriving, when a student casually offered me some pot when I was visiting his room. I never witnessed any pot, or other drugs, in gatherings of the faculty, though I assume some faculty smoked pot with the students from time to time. At any rate, it had nothing to do with the GIS.”

Tanty echoes these viewpoints: "Mullin was old and old school. The school was old school, a staid, forgotten college in a backwater farming community of northwestern Illinois. The buildings looked old and stately with huge gates at the main entrance and a history that went back before the Civil War. Then the sixties happened and sixties kind of students came. New teachers were young and probably cut the average teacher age in half. Older pictures of campus activity showed women marching in twos to town in their Sunday finery. Now they would be braless. It was a culture clash identical to that that was happening throughout the country. In that way, I think that Shimer was no different than UC Berkeley. It wasn't any one act; the times were changing."

Other changes that took place between Dowty’s time as a student and his year as an instructor was that students were now allowed cars and could consequently travel to other towns to drink, and dating between students and faculty was not considered taboo, at least as long as they were open relationships and did not conflict with any academic considerations.

In the end, the GIS did not have the same effect on all students or faculty. Former student George Tanty watched both the strife and the results the following school year (1967-68). One of the first orders of business was the resignation of Mullin, replaced by the recently- retired editor of the Chicago Sun Times, Milburn "Pete" Akers. Tanty recalls the new president as one "who smoked Lucky Strikes, swilled martinis, regaled us with stories about going to Alaska to cover the earthquake with Abe Fortas, attending a birthday party in a tent city in a desert of the Shah of Iran, and so forth. Obviously this falls outside of Bellairs' time on campus but I think he would have liked Pete lots more than Mullin."

Of course, President Akers had demonstrations and protests during his administration, too. Did he go about combating these differently than his predecessor? Yes, says Tanty. "His first step was that he sent out for coffee and doughnuts and had them delivered to the students doing the sit in."

For further reading of the era, Tanty suggests the copy of Look magazine, with an article about drugs on campus and where Shimer was called "The Midwest Mecca of the Marijuana Mystique." Also, notes Tanty, "The Chicago Tribune ran an article around 1968 with my all time favorite quote which I still remember from memory: 'Despite its nodding countenance of budding tranquility, Shimer College plays devil's advocate to the Big Ten and ivy league schools.'"

Dowty adds an arresting portrait of Shimer in the 1960s is in an autobiography of Mark Benney, “another remarkable Shimer figure who visited Shimer in between my years (1959-1966). The book is Almost a Gentleman; the passages on Poffy's will tie in with John's account, and Benney's account of how Mullin forced him out will shed light on the power structure at Shimer."